The Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry
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The most important prize administered by the Sewanee Review is the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry. It was made possible through the generous bequest of Dr. K. P. A. Taylor to celebrate his younger brother Conrad Aiken's accomplishments as a poet. In the fall of 2008, the twenty-second Aiken Taylor Award was presented.
The Sewanee Review is proud to announce that John Haines was the twenty-second poet to receive the Aiken Taylor Award for a lifetime of poetry.
Through the generosity of Dr. K. P. A. Taylor, the Sewanee Review established an annual award in 1987 honoring a distinguished American poet for the work of a career. Howard Nemerov was the first poet honored and was immediately followed by Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht. The other recipients of this important prize (which cannot be applied for) include Gwendolyn Brooks, Grace Schulman, Wendell Berry, and most recently Brendan Galvin and Anne Stevenson.
This year the Aiken Taylor award brought acclaimed poet and essayist John Haines to campus in celebration of his poetry over the past forty years. Author of numerous books, including his collected poems, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, and essays written primarily about his experiences homesteading in Alaska, John Haines is called an "uncommon man" by Dana Gioia, "unusual even in his virtues. He has been a slow and serious writer in a culture which celebrates speed and accessibility. Patient and tenacious, he has been more interested in perfecting his work than in popularizing it." Mr. Haines' latest collection of poems has been decades in the making. Of Your Passage, O Summer is a compilation of work from the 1950s and 60s, thought lost for decades and only recently rediscovered and published by Limberlost Press.
In the Sewanee Review David Mason has written, "Few modern poets have been so committed to a life outside the conventional economy." After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Mr. Haines built a cabin on 160 acres in a remote area southeast of Fairbanks and supported himself largely through hunting and trapping. It was during this time that he found his true vocation in poetry as well as art, even leaving Alaska for several years to attend art schools in D.C. and New York. For its reflections of the austerity, beauty, and spaciousness of the Alaskan wilderness, Haines's poetry is admired by critics, and his later work has been praised for transcending and enlarging upon the "limits of regionalism" to roam instead "the uncharted places of the spirit."
The Aiken Taylor Award is one of many honors accorded to Mr. Haines, past poet-laureate of Alaska. He has been awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress and the Alaska Center for the Book, two Guggenheim fellowships, and an NEA fellowship.
This year's Aiken Taylor award was presented on Thursday, December 4th by the vice chancellor of the University of the South, and was followed by selected readings from Mr. Haines' long career. Click here to listen to the audio file from the reading.
On the day preceding the award and poetry reading, William Harmon, renowned essayist and long-time contributor to the Sewanee Review, presented a lecture on Mr. Haines entitled "The Only Wisdom: The Example of John Haines."
To read an interview with John Haines, click here.
- Howard Nemerov (1987)
- Richard Wilbur (1988)
- Anthony Hecht (1989)
- W. S. Merwin (1990)
- John Frederick Nims (1991)
- Gwendolyn Brooks (1992)
- George Starbuck (1993)
- Wendell Berry (1994)
- Maxine Kumin (1995)
- Fred Chappell (1996)
- Carolyn Kizer (1997)
- X. J. Kennedy (1998)
- George Garrett (1999)
- Eleanor Ross Taylor (2000)
- Frederick Morgan (2001)
- Grace Schulman (2002)
- Daniel Hoffman (2003)
- Henry Taylor (2004)
- B. H. Fairchild (2005)
- Brendan Galvin (2006) click here to listen
- Anne Stevenson (2007) click here to listen
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